“That is another of your odd notions,” said the Prefect, who had a fashion of calling every thing “odd” that was beyond his comprehension, and thus lived amid an absolute legion of “oddities.”
—Edgar Allan Poe, “The Purloined Letter” (1844)
There is a story, probably apocryphal, of a Native American scouting expedition that came across the starving members of the Donner Party in 1847, who were snowbound in the Sierra Nevadas and resorted to cannibalism in order to survive. The expedition, which had never seen white people before, observed the Donner Party from a distance, then returned to base camp to report what they had seen. The report consisted of four words: “They eat each other.”
—Morris Berman, author of Why America Failed
“If the founder of Philadelphia could have imagined the city as it exists now he would certainly have been shocked. Faceless confusion, loss of individuality, imprisoning miles of urban and suburban growth with their throughways are the exact denial of all the social ethics of the pietists of the seventeenth or the philosophers of the eighteenth century. What they contemplated was not a conurbation but a capital, a center for the cultural and commercial life of a region, for the coming together of cosmopolitan people and ideas and interests. Philadelphia – or New York or Chicago – are no longer centers for the surrounding countryside. It takes hours of frustration to reach them. The proper functions of a capital can be performed only if it be easily accessible and built on a proper human scale; only recently did people begin to suppose that any place of fewer than a million inhabitants must by definition be a provincial backwater.”
—Laurence Lafore, American Classic (1975)
What NASA is calling “Blue Marble 2012”:
Of the original Blue Marble photo, Leonard Shlain had this to say:
“Like a Chinese ideograph, NASA’s photograph of our blue marble conveyed multiple values simultaneously, values more intuitive than rational. The masculine perception of nature and the Earth itself as ‘things’ to be conquered made the space program possible. The photo it generated began to instill in everyone who saw it an understanding that the Earth must be honored, protected, and loved. That many environmentalists are men confirms this change in orientation. NASA’s photograph of the Earth floating in space provided people with ‘the big picture.’ One sees the big picture with the entire retina and the combined hemispheres. The inviting, mute image of the home planet floating in dark space did more to change the consciousness of its residents than the miles of type concerning the subject generated by the world’s writers.”
Posted in books, photography, quotes
“‘Okay, Marlowe,’ I said between my teeth. ‘You’re a tough guy. Six feet of iron man. One hundred and ninety pounts stripped and with your face washed. Hard muscles and no glass jaw. You can take it. You’ve been sapped down twice, had your throat choked and been beaten half silly on the jaw with a gun barrel. You’ve been shot full of hop and kept under it until you’re as crazy as two waltzing mice. And what does all that amount to? Routine.’”
—Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely
One of Flannery O’Connor’s early drawings:
“Do you have any books the faculty doesn’t particularly recommend?”
(Via Wesley Hill.)
In an interview about his latest book, McKenzie Wark discusses his preference for “low theory”:
The American university is where so-called ‘French theory’ was actually invented, and not in philosophy departments but via comparative literature, other literature departments, sometimes media studies, and various other places. So you couldn’t quite call it philosophy—it got called ‘theory’ and sometimes ‘high theory’. You end up with this construct, based essentially around the reception of Derrida into the Anglophone world through these centres of intellectual power in the US. And this is interesting, but it occupies a certain kind of terrain, a certain space. It requires a certain training.
I’ve always been much more interested in something else: The self-conscious attempt to construct conceptual practices outside of formal settings. That is what Marx did, it’s what Freud did, it’s what Benjamin did; I’d even say it’s what Nietzsche did, because of course he’s on ‘permanent leave’ when he’s writing all these amazing books, when he’s already losing it. Somehow, these guys are all now ‘high theory’, but that’s not where they came from whatsoever. Marx is not a philosopher, Freud is not a philosopher, Benjamin is not a philosopher; I’d even say Nietzsche is not a philosopher. They’re all doing ‘low theory’, and I’m trying to tell stories that fit into that tradition, maybe not at that level, but as a whole other way of thinking about the practice of knowledge in everyday life. This puts on the table the question of the politics of knowledge in a way that can’t be directly asked, or answered, in the space of the university.
Yeah, me too.
Posted in academe, books, philosophy, writing
“Most graduate students are convinced that the way you get ideas is to read journal articles. But in my experience journals really aren’t a very good source of original ideas. You can get lots of things from journal articles – technique, insight, even truth. But most of the time you will only get someone else’s ideas. True, they may leave a few loose ends lying around that you can pick up on, but the reason they are loose is probably that the author thought about them a while and couldn’t figure out what to do with them or decided they were too tedious to bother with – which means that it is likely that you will find yourself in the same situation. My suggestion is rather different: I think that you should look for your ideas outside the academic journals – in newspapers, in magazines, in conversations, and in TV and radio programs.”
—Hal Varian
(Via.)
Related post: Invisible Literature.
Posted in academe, books, inspiration, quotes
“He was a serious man, he was matter-of-fact and practical, down to his running shoes. I wondered about his eerie self-assurance, his freedom from doubt. Is this the point of Armageddon? No ambiguity, no more doubt. He was ready to run into the next world. He was forcing the next world to seep into my consciousness, stupendous events that seemed matter-of-fact to him, self-evident, reasonable, imminent, true. I did not feel Armageddon in my bones but I worried about all those people who did, who were ready for it, wishing hard, making phone calls and bank withdrawals. If enough people want it to happen, will it happen? How many people are enough people?”
—Don DeLillo, White Noise
Posted in apocalypse, books, quotes
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